March 2006, Week 2 --
Every Man and Woman a Star

Here's the setup: You
attach a Web cam to the top of your monitor. (Cheap or expensive Web
camera; it's up to you.) Then you load Vlog It! software and speak.
You're on! -- ready to broadcast a video blog.

Vlog It! creates video blogs in real time.
If you want or need a script, you can enter the words into the program's
"teleprompter" section. When you read that, it will look like you're
talking right into the camera. You can bring in video or still clips
from your own cameras or some other source, and provide commentary on
those.

If you use a green or blue screen behind you
as you record your video blog, you can put in any background. This is a
technique from the movie industry: Special effects, like Superman flying
through the air, are done with an actor suspended from a harness in
front of a green screen. Later, any background can be used to replace
the solid green color behind the figure, which acts as a blank screen.
You can do the same thing. You can have a Washington, D.C., backdrop, so
it looks like you're commenting from the capital, or a video of Moscow's
Red Square, to look like a reporter on the scene. That's how they do it
on TV, too.

After the video blog is recorded, hit
"publish" to create a Flash, Real Player or Windows Media file. The
program automatically posts your "vlog" to PlayStream.com, which is Vlog
It's hosting partner for viewing. There is a 15-day free trial for
hosting at PlayStream, which costs $8 a month after that.

Vlog It! is $50 and for Windows only. It will not work with Macs using a
Windows simulator. You can get more info at the Web site:
www.seriousmagic.com.

High-Tech Org Charts

There must be a dozen programs for making
company organizational charts, but the most interesting one we've seen
is the recent release of OrgPlus 6. This is a program used by 400 of
America's 500 largest companies.

As with other software that creates
organizational charts, the program lets you put in color photos of
personnel along with pertinent information drawn from a database. What
takes it way beyond those charts is the ability to draft and change
budgets.

The salary of each employee is part of the
chart, which is password-protected, of course. When budgeting any
project, personnel costs are automatically calculated and adjusted for
annual raises. If any department is over budget, you can have a red line
automatically appear around that department head.

To rearrange budgets to match tasks,
personnel can be moved around the chart to fit. So someone who is over
budget or short-staffed can be balanced by moving some people around to
different departments.

An employee's job in the company can usually
be identified by color coding. Photos of salespeople can have a green
border, for example, engineers a blue border, and so on.

There are lots of features here: A large
chart can be divided into sub-charts with a mouse click. Charts can be
saved as a PDF file, a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation. The
full program costs $190 from
www.orgplus.com. We searched further, however, and found that you
can get a free version of the program that works with Microsoft Office,
a sort of OrgPlus light, by going to
www.orgplusexpress.com.

Professional Labels for CDs

You can easily make full-color labels for CDs and DVDs
using any of the low-cost kits made by Verbatim, Fellowes, Avery or
Memorex. We tried a kit from Verbatim and had great results and a
moderately serious problem.

The starter kit cost $10 through
www.verbatim.com, and the others all sell for about the same price.
What you get is an assortment of adhesive labels and an applicator that
allows you to exactly center the label on the disk. Indented edges on
the paper lock with ridges on the applicator so there can be no mistake.
Once you have the applicator that comes with the kit, additional labels
can be purchased for $10 per hundred.

The labels work with either inkjet or laser printers, but
we had a problem with the laser. There are two labels to each 8
1/2-by-11-inch sheet, and they can be peeled off separately. Following
Verbatim's instructions, we removed the first label and reinserted the
remaining half-sheet. It jammed our laser printer. The second time, we
ignored those instructions. Instead of tearing off the used portion of
the label, we just turned the sheet around and printed the other side.
The results were great.

Books

"Creating Games in C++" by David Conger; $30 from New
Riders (www.newriders.com;
click on "bookstore").

This is the book to give to a bright 16-year-old who
wants to create video games. There's so much to learn that it's best to
start young, but Conger makes it possible for almost any computer-savvy
person to follow along.

And for the $30 price you get $500 worth of software on
the attached CD, which has a linker, compiler and debugger. If you don't
know what those are, you'd better get started right away. You do not
need to know the C++ programming language. This unusual book teaches you
the language as you invent your games.

The author has written games for Microsoft and Her
Interactive, the maker of the Nancy Drew series of mystery games for
young people.